Stuff Publishes More Inequality Stupidity

Why do people get worked up and waste valuable time pontificating about other people’s pay packets? The clear, rational, logical, sane decision is to figure out what they’re doing to raise the value of their marginal product and get to work building valuable skills.

Life is what you make of it. Constantly blaming circumstance and things you can’t control doesn’t help you take the only possible step forward if you’re not happy with your standard of living – doing something about it.

But income inequality is only going to rise over the next few decades because conscientiousness and hard work on valuable things simply aren’t being done by a significant part of the population.

This all comes down to basic supply and demand. There are wage premiums in different sectors not only because fewer graduates want to do engineering or computer science but because there is an excess supply of “society and culture” degrees including economics being produced.

The relative wage premiums are high because so many more people obtain degrees based on what they are interested in or “passionate” about as opposed to what will put food on the table.

It is almost as if people will foregone that wage premium for IT jobs because they really, really, really don’t want to be thought of by their peers as a nerd or a geek. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried – but when most grads can barely drive an Excel spreadsheet the path dependence effects on income inequality over time are hardly surprising at all.

What is even more funny is that there is an enormous amount of free content available for you to teach yourself valuable skills. But there are new filters on Instagram this week and someone said something wrong on the internet so only people who realise how hyper competitive the globalised labour market is will make the effort.